Efficient responses to climate change require accurate estimates of both aggregate damages and where and to whom they occur. While specific case studies and simulations have suggested that climate change disproportionately affects the poor, large-scale direct evidence of the magnitude and origins of this disparity is lacking. Similarly, evidence on aggregate damages, which is a […]

Using a dataset of 15 million UK job adverts from a recruitment website, we construct new economic statistics measuring labour market demand. These data are ‘naturally occurring’, having originally been posted online by firms. They offer information on two dimensions of vacancies—region and occupation—that firm-based surveys do not usually, and cannot easily, collect. These data […]

Barber and Odean study the relationship between trading activity and returns. They find that households who trade more have a lower net return than other households. They argue that these results cannot emerge from a model with rational traders and instead attribute these findings to overconfidence. In contrast, we find that household financial choices generated […]

Chinese local governments wield their enormous political power and administrative capacity to provide “special deals” for favored private firms. We argue that China’s extraordinary economic growth comes from these special deals. Local political leaders do so because they derive personal benefits, either political or monetary, from providing special deals. Competition between local governments limits the […]

We introduce a computationally tractable dynamic equilibrium model of the automobile market where new and used cars of multiple types (e.g. makes/models) are traded by heterogeneous consumers. Prices and quantities are determined endogenously to equate supply and demand for all car types and vintages, along with the ages at which cars are scrapped. The model […]

Follow up on US Construction Industry Data.

At the beginning of the summer of 2015, both labor statistics on employment levels and US Gross Domestic Product showed a slowdown on job creation coming from construction related activities. Given that the summer represents a time window for developers to build fast thanks to good weather conditions, economists always expect summer job increases to largely stem from construction. However, it was not the case for the summer of 2015, which alerted analysts to look cautiously at construction investment. On the first week of July, Econometricus.com poked on construction investment by looking at statistics on Construction Put in Place (US Census Bureau) for the month of May of 2015, as a way to find out whether or not construction investments had slowed-down effectively. Data on such a metric revealed no statistically significant change, which accurately corresponded to data reflecting job creation from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and data on GDP growth. Now that the summer is almost gone, it is worth looking at Residential Construction to either dissipate or collect more concerns.July’s Construction Data from the US Census Bureau and the US Housing Department.

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On annual basis increases were significant, but on monthly basis they were not so much. For instance, projected economic activity on residential construction increased significantly in aggregate terms for Approved Building Permits, Housing Starts, and Housing Completion, for the month of July 2015. On one hand, and in spite of a decrease from the previous month of June, plans to build housing units jumped 7.5% when compared to the month of July 2014. Likewise, Housing Starts augmented by 10% in July 2015 when compared to the same month of 2014. In terms of Housing Completion, which shows how fast contractors wanted to finish their work during the summer, privately-owned completed units skyrocketed by 14.6% in July 2015 vis-à-vis July 2014.

Construction summer statistics by region.

Regionally speaking, so far this summer the South has shown decent pace of Housing Completion growth. But, it is not the same case everywhere else. In the West region, privately-owned Housing units completed has declined steadily since summer 2015 started. In the Midwest, although July represented a rebound for the statistic, the numbers dropped to winter season levels. Currently the rate of Completed units is a bit higher than it was a year before though. On the other hand, the Northeast region bounced back after a big drop in June 2015. The graph below shows the trajectory for New Privately-owned Housing units completed, in which the blue line represents the Northeast region. The region’s statistic is back at the level it was one year before.

Privately-Owned Housing Units.

Therefore, coming up with a set of conclusions, to determine whether or not housing is holding back economic growth and job creation, is really hard at this point of the year. Having seen what we have observed so far, it is tough to adventure hardcore statements. However, except by the South region, Construction has experienced a slow-down all over the United States during the summer of 2015, which is reflects on both indicators, jobs and GDP Growth.